American Empire

Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization

Neil Smith

Publication Year: 2003

An American Empire, constructed over the last century, long ago overtook European colonialism, and it has been widely assumed that the new globalism it espoused took us "beyond geography." Neil Smith debunks that assumption, offering an incisive argument that American globalism had a distinct geography and was pieced together as part of a powerful geographical vision. The power of geography did not die with the twilight of European colonialism, but it did change fundamentally. That the inauguration of the American Century brought a loss of public geographical sensibility in the United States was itself a political symptom of the emerging empire. This book provides a vital geographical-historical context for understanding the power and limits of contemporary globalization, which can now be seen as representing the third of three distinct historical moments of U.S. global ambition.

The story unfolds through a decisive account of the career of Isaiah Bowman (1878–1950), the most famous American geographer of the twentieth century. For nearly four decades Bowman operated around the vortex of state power, working to bring an American order to the global landscape. An explorer on the famous Machu Picchu expedition of 1911 who came to be known first as "Woodrow Wilson’s geographer," and later as Frankin D. Roosevelt’s, Bowman was present at the creation of U.S. liberal foreign policy.

A quarter-century later, Bowman was at the center of Roosevelt’s State Department, concerned with the disposition of Germany and heightened U.S. access to European colonies; he was described by Dean Acheson as a key "architect of the United Nations." In that period he was a leader in American science, served as president of Johns Hopkins University, and became an early and vociferous cold warrior. A complicated, contradictory, and at times controversial figure who was very much in the public eye, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Bowman’s career as a geographer in an era when the value of geography was deeply questioned provides a unique window into the contradictory uses of geographical knowledge in the construction of the American Empire. Smith’s historical excavation reveals, in broad strokes yet with lively detail, that today's American-inspired globalization springs not from the 1980s but from two earlier moments in 1919 and 1945, both of which ended in failure. By recharting the geography of this history, Smith brings the politics—and the limits—of contemporary globalization sharply into focus.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

List of Maps

Prologue

In November 2001, U.S. forces seized a rural part of southern Afghanistan
near Kandahar, and in a staged display jubilant marines hoisted an American
flag on the highest point of the terrain. The reference to Teddy Roosevelt’s
Rough Riders on San Juan Hill at the dawn of the first moment of
U.S. global ambition or to U.S. marines on Iwo Jima ...

Acknowledgments

So deeply did the conundrum of a lost geography churn inside me that “I
either had to write the book,” as Hermann Hesse once said, “or be reduced
to despair.” It took a long time, and the work has left me in massive intellectual
debt. ...

1. The Lost Geography of the American Century

The story is told, perhaps apocryphally, that in May 1898 when William
McKinley received the news that Commodore George Dewey had sailed
into Manila Bay, routed the Spanish navy, and claimed the Philippines, the
president was immediately jubilant—but also quickly puzzled. ...

Part I. From Exploration to Enterprise: Geography on the Cusp of Empire

2. 1898 and the Making of a Practical Man

The Spanish-American War of 1898 was a watershed in the historical geography
of U.S. expansionism. The national and state boundaries of the
United States were effectively in place, even though several territories had
yet to consummate statehood, and the geographical claims that resulted
from the war were less about national consolidation than international colonization. ...

3. “Conditional Conquest”: Geography, Labor, and Exploration in South America

As the conquests of 1898 suggest, the first mappings of the American Century
represented a continuity with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
more than a harbinger of new geographies. To be a geographer in the passing
era was to be an explorer, an adventurer into the “unknown space and
barbaric chaos,” ...

4. The Search for Geographical Order: The American Geographical Society

The United States at the turn of the twentieth century was gripped by a
“search for order,” according to historian Robert Wiebe in the classic book
of that title. Through most of the nineteenth century, the country encompassed
a society without a core, a highly decentralized agglomeration of
communities and towns with equally dispersed political and economic powers. ...

Part II. The Rise of Foreign Policy Liberalism: The Great War and the New World

5. The Inquiry: Geography and a “Scientific Peace”

Shortly after the “lovely little war” of 1898, the Treaty of Paris was signed
between a vanquished Spain, finally stripped of its colonies, and a victorious
United States only beginning to descry world power. Whatever the treaty’s
profound implications, the peace negotiations that produced it were a decidedly
low-key affair. ...

6. A Last Hurrah for Old World Geographies: Fixing Space at the Paris Peace Conference

On a cold December day in 1918, three army trucks arrived at pierside in
Hoboken, New Jersey, where the SS George Washington was being prepared
to transport the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference.
The “war to end all wars” was being followed by the conference to end all
conferences, ...

7. “Revolutionarily Yours”: The New World, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Making of Liberal Foreign Policy

“Even the empty spaces of the world are no longer non-political,” Bowman
announced after the war.1 This could well have been adopted as the
anthem for the new liberal foreign policy that developed in the interstices
of 1920s isolationist ideologies in the United States. ...

Part III. The Empire at Home: Science and Politics

8. “The Geography of Internal Affairs”: Pioneer Settlement as National Economic Development

Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous deployment of 1890 census data enshrined
the belief that the frontier in the United States was gone. More important,
it crystallized a national myth that the western frontier involved
the defining experience in “American” history. This was ominous. ...

9. The Kantian University: Science and Nation Building at Johns Hopkins

The idea of the modern university dates to the German idealists, especially
to Kant. The university for Kant is devoted to reason, internally ordered by
the logical division of knowledge into faculties and “disciplines” that express
the conceptual divisions of the world, and the individual thinker is its
central figure. ...

Part IV. The American Lebensraum

10. Geopolitics: The Reassertion of Old World Geographies

The end of World War I closed the curtains on the first formative moment
of the American Century. It intimated a new calibration of geography with
economic expansion and was for many a time of optimism.Woodrow Wilson’s
new diplomacy and his aspirations for a tidied map of Europe were
meant to take international political and diplomatic relations beyond a concern
for geography. ...

11. Silence and Refusal: Refugees, Race, and Economic Development

In late June 1933, the president of the American Geographical Society, Dr.
John Finley, received an unusual letter from Berlin. It came from Hubert R.
Knickerbocker, a journalist with the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Evening Post, and it concerned the young German geographer Karl A.
Wittfogel. ...

12. Settling Affairs with the Old World: Dismembering Germany?

When on 17 March 1944 Bowman was summoned to the White House to
consult with Roosevelt over his impending State Department mission to
London, it was a familiar routine for him. But this time the press corps at
the White House gates buzzed with excitement. ...

13. Toward Development: Shaking Loose the Colonies

On the eve of World War II, more than 60 percent of foreign direct investment
from the developed capitalist world was targeted at the developing
world. As anomalous as this was historically, it fostered the assumption that
postwar economic expansion would focus on what came to be known as the
third world. ...

With war drawing to a close, attention in the U.S. State Department increasingly
turned toward the design of the United Nations, the jewel in the
crown of the postwar American Lebensraum and the fulcrum on which the
second moment of the American Century balanced. ...

Part V. The Bitter End

15. Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

The end of World War II should have been Isaiah Bowman’s crowning moment.
The United Nations Charter was ratified in October 1945, and to his
initial relief a more conservative, farm-raised midwesterner now occupied
the White House. “We can look forward to the greatest age in mankind,”
Harry Truman had announced at Potsdam in July 1945 ...

16. Geographical Solicitude, Vital Anomaly

The American Century is synonymous with globalization. The first formative
moment, from 1898 to 1919, adumbrated the vision of a global political
economy that would simultaneously surpass the regional parameters of the
European empires and entwine a global political structure (the League of Nations)
with an already accomplished world market. ...

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